Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) may look like a typical teenage girl, but she’s not. She’s really a vampire slayer. The opening narration of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer provides some background: “In every generation, there
is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” Among other superhuman pow- ers, a slayer has extraordinary strength and agility, heightened perceptual awareness, and the ability to heal far more quickly than a normal human. Each Slayer is also assigned a Watcher—a sort of mentor/adviser/coach on all matters relating to her special mission. Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles (An- thony Head), works by day as a librarian at Buffy’s high school. Along with Giles and a group of friends referred to as the “Scooby Gang,” Buffy saves the world, again and again, from the forces of evil. (Because her hometown of Sunnydale, California, is built on a hellmouth, it is a particular magnet for such forces.)
The show, which ran for seven seasons, featured Angel as Buffy’s love interest during the first three seasons. When it becomes clear that a relation- ship between a vampire slayer and a vampire—even a vampire with a soul—is hopeless, Angel leaves Sunnydale for Los Angeles and gets a television series of his own. In Angel, which ran for five seasons (the first four concurrent with the final four seasons of Buffy), Angel opens a supernatural detective agency and continues the fight for good along with a motley assortment of supporting characters, including Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), formerly an occasional member of the Scooby Gang. The fight morphs into a personal crusade for Angel once he learns that he may have a special destiny. Contained in the ancient Scrolls of Aberjian, the Shanshu Prophecy predicts that the vampire with a soul, after enduring numerous trials and playing a key role in the apocalypse, will be rewarded with the gift of human life. Much of the series is thus framed by Angel’s quest for redemption.
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our world, only its evil is a lot more tangible. Importantly, the everyday folk in the Buffyverse don’t easily accept the fact that there are vampires among them. When confronted with evidence of vampiric violence, they assume it must be the product of psychosis or pharmaceuticals. And even when they encounter vampires face-to-face, they’re almost always unwilling to believe what they see with their own eyes. In this way the vampires and demons that populate the Buffyverse fit the standard horror prototype. As described by Noël Carroll in his influential work The Philosophy of Horror, what’s distinctive about monsters of horror is that they disturb the natural order. Monsters appear in fairy tales as well as in works of horror, but in the latter, “it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character in an ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary creature in an extraordinary world” (1990, 16).
Monsters of horror are thus “metaphysical misfits” (Carroll 1990, 54). Like zombies and ghosts, vampires are neither living nor dead—or perhaps they are both. In one of his many studies of occult phenomena, Montague Summers (no relation to Buffy) offers a similar assessment: “The vampire has a body, and it is his own body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne in the phantom world; a pariah
among the fiends” (1960, 6).2 Vampires thus fall between the cracks of our
usual categories; in Carroll’s terms, they are categorically interstitial or cat-
egorically contradictory (1990, 32).3 In fact, their transgression of standard
categorical and ontological boundaries is part of what makes the monsters of horror so horrific. We are both physically and cognitively threatened by their unnaturalness, their impurity, and we thus react to them with both fear and repugnance.
While all vampires defy easy classification, Angel presents a particular puzzle. Born as Liam in Galway, Ireland, in 1727, he is reborn as Angelus when sired by the vampire Darla (Julie Benz) in 1753. After discovering the pleasure of his first kill, he unhesitatingly murders his entire family—the first steps in a sociopathic rampage that lasts almost a century and a half. As Angel later describes that time: “I offered an ugly death to everyone I met. And I did it with a song in my heart.” Even other vampires are awestruck by his capacity for evil; the legendary vampire known as the Master considers
Angelus “the most vicious creature” he has ever encountered.4 But with his
murder of a gypsy girl in 1898, everything changes for Angelus. The gypsy elders conjure a perfect punishment to avenge their loss by restoring the soul that had departed from his body when he became a vampire. Regaining one’s soul means regaining one’s conscience. Instantly, he becomes tormented by
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his past. Able to remember in agonizing detail every life that he took, he now empathically experiences the incredible anguish of his victims. The crushing
waves of guilt, shame, and remorse drive him to the brink of insanity.5 He
spends the next century trying to come to grips with his predicament. As Angel puts it, “You have no idea what it’s like to have done the things I’ve done . . . and to care” (Buffy: “Angel”).
When Buffy wonders whether it’s possible for a vampire to be a good person, Giles responds negatively: “A vampire isn’t a person at all. It may have the movements, the memories, even the personality of the person that it took over, but it’s still a demon at the core. There is no halfway.” But the case of Angel threatens to prove him wrong. Angel is not quite a vampire, but he’s not quite human either:
Darla: Guess what precious? You’re not one of them, are you? Angel: No. But I’m not exactly one of you, either. (Buffy: “Angel”) Angel thus perfectly epitomizes the kind of categorical contradiction de- scribed by Carroll. He’s dead, but he’s still living. He’s a demon, but he has a soul. And he’s in love with Buffy, a vampire slayer whose mission is to kill creatures like him. In fact, the mutual affection between Buffy and Angel leads to one of the most intriguing elements of his plight. When their ro- mantic relationship is consummated, they discover an additional twist to the punishment inflicted by the gypsies: “Angel was meant to suffer. Not to live as human. One moment of true happiness, of contentment, one moment where the soul that we restored no longer plagues his thoughts, and that soul is taken from him” (Buffy: “Becoming,” part 1). The upshot is that sex with Buffy might be said to literally make Angel a new man. His soul leaves
his body and he once again becomes Angelus.6